'Kill List' director to make 'psychedelic,' mushroom-fueled English Civil War movie

The next project from British director Ben Wheatley will be a period piece called A Field In England. Set in 1648, during the English Civil War, the movie’s cast includes comedians Julian Barratt from U.K. TV show The Mighty Boosh, Reece Shearsmith from The League of Gentlemen, and Michael Smiley, who starred in Wheatley’s recent, gut-churning, hit men-horror movie Kill List.

Smiley will play an alchemist who captures a group of deserters. According to a synopsis provided by the project’s financiers, Film4.0, the group seek nourishment from a vast mushroom circle and then descend into a “chaos of arguments, fighting and paranoia.” Film4.0 describes the film as a “psychedelic trip into magic madness,” which sounds very much like business as (un)usual for the genre-splicing Wheatley, whose most recent film, Sightseers, was acquired by IFC earlier this year. A Field In England is set to start shooting later this month. It has also been announced that, after wrapping A Field, the prolific director will then make his “cops-versus-monsters” movie Freakshift.

Those unfamiliar with Wheatley’s seriously unhinged oeuvre can check out the trailers for Kill List, Sightseers, and his debut movie Down Terrace below.